If Rahm thinks slashing special ed budgets is the road to solvency, he is sadly mistaken. As the grand-parent of a child at North Grand H.S. with special needs, I can promise you that CPS' plan to cut more than $42 million in special ed funding and lay off 500 special ed teachers and staff will not stand.Teacher Phil CantorNorth Grand teacher Phil Canto […]

The Disappearing Trick You’ve vanished again, somehowmoved from the seventeenth row,thirteenth stone in from the road,snowflakes blown horizontalacross the wide sweep of the deadwhile I stumble in cold feet,cold hands hanging onto the plastic wreathI intend to clamp to your graveand tie secure with the thin green threads,but you’re nowhere to be found, gone […]

AG Lisa Madigan: A Blind Eye to Political Corruption in Illinois?You’ve probably already read or heard about the plea from the FBI for all citizens to assist in the naming of political corruption in the State of Kentucky.“Federal crime-fighters started an outreach campaign Friday to recruit Kentuckians to help uncover government corruption and end the state […]

$4 million dollars of education fund money was made as an “improper payment” for “undelivered” delivered software. Of course the Brevard County Board of Education members were aware of and approved this. Why is there any question of their responsibility? … Continue reading →

Yesterday, I reported on the House Ethics Committee's 28-page exoneration of Danny Davis and lots of other representatives in the matter of an illegal junket arranged by former Niagara Foundation Executive Director Kemal Oksuz.In short, the Committee found no major wrongdoing on the part of the representatives, and it took a ridiculous swing at the Wash […]

This post is borrowed from Jose Vilson’s intro to our latest newsletter. If you’d like to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, please click here. Hashtags aren’t just hashtags. Much of the criticism lobbed towards “hashtag activism” is that it isn’t substantive or tantamount to actual change. Yet, the hashtag has formed a digital symbolism for... The post […]

PEORIA, IL -- Foes of the sale of six acres of Riverfront Park gathered on July 30 to issue five questions to Peoria City Council members, at a news conference. Dave Pittman, a leader of the group, is interviewed by...

Chris Christie says it's time to punch teacher unions in the face. This isn't surprising coming from the bombastic lunatic he is. This is a guy who makes agreements to fund pensions in exchange for higher contributions from state employees, and then turns around and says, "Screw you, I'm not paying." This is a guy who shouts down you […]

Last time, I challenged the reformy notion that higher standards a priori lead to better test-based performance. The basis for my challenge is a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics: "Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales: Results From the 2013 NAEP Reading and Mathematics Assessments."The fine folks at NCES l […]

A few years ago, John Holland and I started this blog called The Future of Teaching [now defunct], dedicated to the themes of the book Teaching2030: What We Must Do … When we first started in 2009, we wanted a clearer vision for what teacher leadership looks like in our local and national context, not ruffling feathers (!) per se, but tackling the more compl […]

In Unity there is Strength. It’s why we negotiate as a union, instead of, for example, as math teachers. Or as high school teachers. Or as special ed teachers. Or as art teachers. It’s also why we do not negotiate one school at a time. Except in Prose schools. Now, some Prose schools got a […]

Mercedes Schneider actually read the bulky contracts between states and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Her most surprising discovery: SBAC promises: “Passing an SBAC high school summative assessment assures that students will not need remediation. SBAC really ensures college readiness!” How do they know? When this was written into the contract, […]

Why are urban teachers being trained to be robots? By Amy Berard *Give him a warning,* said the voice through the earpiece I was wearing. I did as instructed, speaking in the emotionless monotone I’d been coached to use. But the student, a sixth grader with some impulsivity issues and whose trust I’d spent months […]

McGraw-Hill/CBT is pulling out of the $1.1 billion high-stakes testing market. The reason? Too much volatility. It seems that the wave of political protests and the parent opt-out movement have forced McGraw to move to greener more peaceful pastures. And, as the common-core tests have rolled out, the overall market for state assessments has largely flatlined […]

"A financial analysis for 2012 of the British-based publishing giant Pearson is available online at 4-traders.com. It tells a very interesting, if frightening story that needs to be more widely circulated in the United States, especially among parents, teachers, and educational policy makers. Something consistently missing in a report that emphasizes gr […]